novel ideas

How to Start a Fake Jewelry Line, According to ​​The Clasp​​ Author Sloane Crosley

It’s hard to describe it on your résumé, but one of the first skills you fine-tune when you work as an assistant in publishing is the art of restaurant reservations. That’s how Sloane Crosley and I found ourselves seated at Osteria al Doge, a completely O.K. pre-theater place near Times Square where both of us had made many countless reservations in our former jobs—hers, as an assistant to a literary agent, mine an assistant for a magazine editor. Before she even took off her jacket, she pointed to my neck—you gotta fix that, with the universal gesture for move-your-necklace-clasp-to-the-back-of-your-neck. Then make a wish—don’t share it.

It was an auspicious start, perhaps so auspicious you’d think I’m making it up, as Crosley’s new book, her first novel, called The Clasp, comes out this week and centers around the search for a historic necklace stolen by Nazis in W.W. II. Everything begins at a wedding, with a group of college friends who are now in that hazy post-collegiate phase in life where the things that once connected them all are far in the past. And if you’ve been to a lot of weddings this summer, it’s all too real. Also interwoven in the funny and addicting caper is the famous short story by Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace.

Crosley, whose previous books were I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, is known for her essays, “narrative nonfiction” as they call it in college course books, though I’d call it “the truth, but funnier,” of the David Sedaris school. The kind of books that make you laugh out loud while you’re reading them, or at least smile in a way that makes you worried you look like a crazy person on the subway. Though, she told me, “I once saw someone reading my book on the train—the proper book, not the e-book—and she looked kind of entranced. I was sitting right across from her, and then she did one of these [pantomimes checking the book pages and rolling her eyes], to see how much longer she had, and I was like, I am going to trip that bitch! But I did not. It was a nice, healthy, undercutting of whatever ego I was experiencing at the time. Well, you put something out into the world, it is no longer yours.”

There are zingers in The Clasp that echo her essays’, which can describe people with cutting, perceptive detail. One favorite was “rich people had a thing for outdoor showers,” and the description of a couple’s apartment: “In the living room, there were framed LPs and art—a canvas with tiny naked people needle-pointed into it. There was a closet just for coats. . . Oh, to have two incomes in one home. Like having two hairs coming out of one pore, but pleasant.” The “subversive knitting” is a subtle hint to Crosley’s friend Magda Sayeg, a “yarn bomber” whom Crosley interviewed for an airline magazine, an assignment she agreed to after learning of Sayeg’s knitting collective, Knitta Please.

Crosley’s writing uses so much detail from her life, friends, and world around her that it’s both hilariously true and might make an interviewer nervous that any awkward moment would be good material. “My friends joke around if I ever have a complaint,” she said. “If someone is late to the movies, let’s say, I’ll get a text that says, ‘Why don’t you write an essay about it?’ You guys are assholes. Maybe I will!”

To switch gears in order to write a novel, Crosley spent five years researching and writing. She got method. One of the main characters works for an eccentric jeweler (not based on Irene Neuwirth, she emphasized), who has to go to Paris in order to replace a necklace clasp. In Manhattan’s diamond district, Crosley studied catalogues of clasps and hooks and springs and chains, got molds made, and started designing a fake jewelry line. When we met, she was wearing one of her creations, which sort of resembled those souvenir pennies that get flattened out—but in beautifully oxidized sterling silver.

“A note to V.F. readers: don’t steal this idea. It’s an antique charge coin,” she explained. “It’s almost a precursor to the credit card, [for] individualized places. This was my grandmother’s. You’d keep it on your keychain and the store would run a piece of carbon paper over it with a serial number and that’s how they’d keep track of your purchases.”

The charge coins are hard to track down though—in 10 years she’s only found two at flea markets. This all sounds more complicated than it is, she told me, after getting into the details of the differences in chain metals. But “if this doesn’t work out”—meaning, writing— “I have a jewelry line that’s just ready to go. But I don’t have another idea—this is it.”

Then she made the ultimate sacrifice: a research trip to Normandy and to the tiny town of Dieppe to stay at the château where Guy de Maupassant was born (though technically he was born nearby). “I kind of had an affection for Dieppe from growing up in White Plains,” she said, “where everything is gorgeous around you but you’re not in the pretty place . . . It’s not without its charm. The charm is found in the fact that I’m foreign, so everything is interesting. The A.T.M. is interesting. Their bad food is still really good.”

She studied the supermarkets, where all produce is weighed and coded: “You start to notice, if you are foreign, that that’s a just tiny layer of effort that Americans would absolutely not stand for. We have self-checkout for God’s sake! And even that seems like a lot of work.” And at a VRBO she stayed at with a friend, she collected details for chapters in Paris: “I wanted to Talented Mr. Ripley everything in that house—I’m going to use that as a verb. I want to lift up the teacup, the whole thing! I want to know where you got this kitchen sponge. I want to know everything.” The result: pages and pages of notes that “have nothing to do with anything.”

Finally at the château, where a French family both lives and gives tours to visitors, things got off on the wrong foot.

“I arrive, and there’s a girl who’s giving tours who has a neck brace on. And—my French is pretty abominable but it’s passable—I asked what happened, and she said she got in a car accident, so I’m horrified. She immediately went for my luggage, and I took it from her, like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, it’s fine, I’ll take it up.’ And never in the history of the world has that kind of argument been so sustained, she was like, ‘Non, it’s really fine’—she really wanted to. So finally I was like, O.K., fine, and the second she picked up the bag, the woman who owns the château happens to come out of the door. Here I am, this American, making this wounded person carry all my shit. And she comes out, No no no, c’est non possible. I’m like, I’m so sorry! And the girl just shrugged it off and goes away . . . I felt like I was on the back foot for a while.”

Back in New York, she’s headed on book tour soon, “a strange rodeo” of cities and independent bookstores and signings. As a former book publicist, she knows that you can never predict the turnout: “If there’s a small crowd, you can say, ‘It’s sunny out, no one wanted to come in. There’s a blizzard out, nobody went out. There was an election, the local duck exploded’—there’s always a good reason. It’s harder to get people to attend readings now.” She added, “Thanks for reading it, by the way! It’s a big deal to ask somebody to read a book.” Too true, as usual.